Collaboration in education

We are living in the 21^st century, this is the world of science and technology where creative idea can come from individual but the product is from a process of collaboration (Broers, 2005). Therefore, to be successful in the future, we need to see ideas in different ways, we need to work together. This blog post is going to explain what collaboration is, why it important and introduce different types of collaboration in education

What is collaboration?

Collaboration is an active engagement and interaction among group member to achieve a common goal (Dillenbourg, 1999)

Collaboration is the ability to share ideas and thoughts with other people then come up with a combined answer or solution about a particular issue (EdTechReview, 2014)

Also, it is the ability to combine different notions, beliefs and theories into one concrete explanation and that is reflective of the diversity of the group itself (EdTechReview, 2014)

Why collaboration is important?

We are surrounded by thousands of people all with different perspectives and standpoints. What happens when you are placed in a position with someone of opposing viewpoints. If you know how to deal with the situation and have an ability to collaborate, communicate and work together, you will have an easier time integrating and understanding the other person’s position.

Collaboration allows all individuals ability to voice their own opinions and openly work together towards a common goal. Collaboration is not just about getting information from different angles and understanding something new. It also helps with communication, time management, problem-solving, resource allocation and many more skills. The benefits of collaboration are endless.

Collaborative learning has been shown to result in higher student achievement, higher self-esteem and higher motivation for all students, across socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds (Johnson and Johnson, 2009)

Different types of collaboration

There are many different types of collaboration. Within this post, I am going to introduce three main types of collaboration in education which are:

Student - Student collaboration

As we can see, most of the time students are working independently and the key reason for that is it is easier to assess students for their own individual abilities.

Kutnick & Thomas (1990, p.399) found that “students working in pairs performed significantly better than those working individually and pairs improved upon initial performance no matter whether they are placed in equal and unequal matched pairings”.

By teaching other people, children understand the material that they are teaching even more than normal because they have to break it down into smaller components which forces them to try to understand at a higher level what they are actually teaching rather than assume that they understand.

On the other hand, the one who is receiving help of study also gets benefit from this process. For example, there is only one teacher in the classroom, and there are 30 students. Those numbers mean that the chances each student get in help anytime he/she is in class are quite minimal. Therefore, it is better to get help from a peer than no one else. And another great aspect of peer teaching is that the person teaching you is going to teach you at your mental level even though they may be better at the subject. They are going to communicate with you like you speak with yourself. In other words, you can understand 99.9% of everything they say.

This teaching – learning process is not about one person understanding and the other student doesn’t. The thing is that no one truly understands and they will both understand better than they did before.

Student - Teacher collaboration

The main aspect of student - teacher collaboration is that both the students and the teacher share a responsibility in the learning - teaching process. In other words, accountability is not placed on only teachers shoulders. For example, the students can tell the teacher when they don’t understand something or suggesting a different way of explaining a topic or suggesting different uses of technology and then the teacher would obviously be receptive to that and maybe debate those ideas. The students can also bring up things that they want to learn about.

The main point here is communicating. Students should have the right to speak and give out their own opinions instead of following teacher’s instruction only as the way it was in the past. In the past, students were not allowed to talk in class because people believed that talking would interfere the lesson and distracted others attention. However, talk is vitally important to learning, it is the tool which we use to interpret, communicate, work through and make sense of our experiences (Lloyd and Beard, 1995). In other words, teachers and students can be able to understand others needs more if they communicate in class.

Teacher - Teacher collaboration

This is where teachers have time to co-plan a curriculum, giving feedback to another, to debate or discuss student needs, sharing challenges and ways to be better in classes, better in their teaching style. And there is no better person to do that with than a colleague who is in the same profession and understands your position as well as has the same level of expertise.

Conclusion

In all aspects, collaboration is about self-improvement by helping other people but also being challenged to go to another level, you are forced to improve to be better yourself, you broaden your horizon. In other words, you develop horizontally and vertically. And collaboration helps us to become mentally stronger and this is quite controversial because, at the moment, we believe that the more independent we are the stronger we are because we believe that we have to be superior to others at everything and that comes down to insecurities where we afraid of someone being better than us. However, unless we are willing to collaborate, we are not going to improve. We need people around us with different abilities, better abilities in order to improve ourselves.

A vision for collaboration in education in the future

References

EdTechReview (2014) Collaboration: Vital Skills for 21^st century students. Available at: http://edtechreview.in/trends-insights/insights/1420-collaboration-vital-skill-for-21st-century-students (Accessed: 11/12/2017)

Broers, A, (2005). The Triumph of Technology. {The Reith Lectures} 4^th May.

Dilenbourg, P. (1999) Collaborative learning: Cognitive and Computational approaches: Advances in Learning and instruction. Pergamon: London.

Kutnick, P. and Thomas, M. (1990) ‘Dyadic pairings for the enhancement of cognitive development in the school curriculum’. British Educational Research Journal. 16(4).

Lloyd, C. and Beard, J. (1995) Managing classroom collaboration. (Cassell Practical Handbook). London: Cassell.

Johnson, D.W. and Johnson, F. (2009) Joining together: Group theory and group skills. 10^th edn. Boston: Allyn&Bacon.